Mal Waldron

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Malcolm "Mal" Waldron (August 16, 1925 – December 2, 2002) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.

After graduating from college, he began playing professionally in New York in 1950.

Waldron, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy, among other things, played for his own bands and performed for others led by Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy.

During Waldron's tenure as house pianist for Prestige Records in the late 1950s, he appeared on hundreds of albums and composed for many of them, including writing his most well-known song, "Soul Eyes" for Coltrane.

Waldron was often an accompanist for vocalists, and Billie Holiday's regular accompanist from April 1957 to her death in July 1959. Waldron was unable to play or recall any music after a drug overdose in 1963; he recovered his abilities gradually while redeveloping his thinking.

He left the United States in the mid-1960s, landed in Europe, and continued touring internationally until his death. Waldron has released more than 100 albums under his own name and more than 70 for other band leaders in his 50-year career.

He also wrote for modern ballet and supervised the scores of several feature films.

Waldron's roots lay primarily in the hard bop and post-bop styles of the New York club scene of the 1950s, but with time he moved more toward free jazz.

He is well-known for his dissonant chord voicings and distinctive later playing style, which often relied on repetition of notes and motifs.

Early life

Mal Waldron was born in New York City on August 16, 1925, to West Indian immigrants. His father was a mechanical engineer who worked on the Long Island Rail Road. When Mal was four years old, the family migrated to Jamaica, Queens. Waldron's parents were dissatisfied with his early interest in jazz, but he was able to keep it by listening to swing on the radio. Waldron received classical piano lessons from the age of seven to about 16. As Coleman Hawkins' 1939 recording of "Body and Soul," he was inspired to play jazz on tenor saxophone, but he was unable to afford a tenor saxophone. He performed alto for local bands performing for "dances, bar mitzvahs, and Spanish weddings," often taking over the piano's role when other singers performed solos.

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Waldron was called up by the army in 1943 after high school and being enrolled in college, and he was based at West Point, New York, in New York. He was able to enjoy jazz in clubs on 52nd Street and somewhere else in the city. After two years in the army, he returned as a student to Queens College in New York, where he studied under composer Karol Rathaus and made the final decision to change from saxophone to piano. This decision was influenced in large part by Charlie Parker's virtuoso speed on saxophone, as well as the fact that Waldron did not have the extroverted disposition that Waldron considered appropriate for the instrument. He did not become a professional musician, but he was still a member of the G.I. Bill and his parents survived and went to live with them. After receiving a B.A. degree, he took a B.A. Waldron appeared in music in 1949, including with Big Nick Nicholas.

Personal life

Waldron married twice and had seven children, two with his first wife and five with the second. Billie Holiday was the godmother to his first daughter. Elaine, Waldron's first wife, appeared on his albums on occasion. His second wife, Irma, was Japanese, and the couple owned and let several apartments in Japan. Waldron took both families – ex-wife, seven children, and two grandchildren – on his three-week tour of Japan, coincided with his seventieth birthday. In 1979, Waldron's mother died. He could speak English, French, German, and Japanese.

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Later life and career

Waldron began to work with Ike Quebec in New York in 1950 and made his debut with the saxophonist in 1952. They were on Mondays at Café Society Downtown for six or seven months, which made Waldron more well-known and more popular. Waldron worked with Charles Mingus from 1954 to 1956 as part of the latter's jazz composers' workshop. He appeared on many Mingus albums, including Pithecanthropus Erectus, which was a significant step in the march toward freer collective improvisation in jazz. 1001 in 1955 Waldron worked with Lucky Millinder and Lucky Thompson. Waldron formed his own band in 1956, which included Idrees Sulieman (trumpets), Gigi Gryce (alto saxophone), Julian Euell (bass), and Arthur Edgehill (drums). In November of the year, this band saw Waldron's first appearance as a leader, Mal-1. Waldron was Billie Holiday's regular accompanist from April 1957 to her death in July 1959, including for the all-star television program The Sound of Jazz.

Waldron appeared at many sessions for Prestige Records from 1956 to 1958, as the house pianist of the label, a position he took after being introduced to Prestige by saxophonist Jackie McLean. Waldron appeared on several McLean-led recordings, and critic John S. Wilson lauded him for his appearance as "a consistently engaging and innovative pianist, who appears to have new and provocative thoughts even in the middle of a shrilling bedlam." Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, John Coltrane, and Phil Woods were among the Prestige's other leaders. Waldron's own arrangements and compositions for the Prestige sessions, of which his most popular, "Soul Eyes," written for Coltrane, became a well-known jazz standard after its appearance on the 1957 album Interplay for 2 Trumpets and 2 Tenors. In a car traveling to and from the studio in Hackensack, he composed at night at home in St. Albans between all-day recording sessions and in a car traveling to and from the studio. During his time with Prestige, 71–72 Waldron estimated that he created more than 400 pieces of music.

Waldron performed with singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach after she passed away on Holiday. Waldron's playing on his own recordings became more tense, with emotional shifts and variations in minor keys. Waldron performed in Eric Dolphy and Booker Little's quintet in 1961, a promising pairing that ended when Little died at the age of 23. 382–3

Waldron wrote and arranged for early play-along recordings that were released by Music Minus One in addition to writing for his own band and those led by others. Waldron's appearances in some of these recordings were not known at the time. In the ensuing decade, he composed scores for modern ballet in the 1950s and began composing film scores. In The Oxford Companion to Jazz, his writing for The Cool World (released in 1964) was described as one of the first attempts to emphasize improvisation rather than composition in a jazz-based film score.

Waldron was plagued by a heroin overdose in 1963. He recalled in 1998 that a lot of musicians in the 1950s and 1960s felt that taking drugs was essential for career progression. According to Waldron, the police assumed they were all doing it.

Waldron used to believe he had to return to play, but it was a slow process. About a year after the overdose, his physical recovery was sufficient to enable him to re-skill himself, which he did partially by listening to his own records. His recovery as a musician lasted another two years, but "I worked out my solos in advance and played what I had written out" until returning to normal life.

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Waldron spent a considerable time in Europe, including Paris, Rome, Bologna, and Cologne, before moving to Munich in 1967. Waldron was on holiday in France when film director Marcel Carné asked him if he wanted to write the score for Three Rooms in Manhattan, New York or Paris; Waldron's 1958 visit to Europe with Holiday made the decision a simple one. Waldron's reasons for moving to Europe were his dissatisfaction with the "fierce, cutthroat competition, simply to get a job" and the fact that black musicians were paid less than their white counterparts in the United States. In 1967, a score for Three Rooms in Manhattan was followed by one for the American film Sweet Love, Bitter. Waldron also created for theater (Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Dutchman), television, and short films. He played with other expatriates in Europe around this period, including Ben Webster and Kenny Clarke.

Free at Last, Waldron's 1969 album Free at Last was the first on the ECM label. This was an example of Waldron playing "rhythmically rather than soloing on chord changes," he said. Another Waldron recording session was the first for another company that was more well-known – Enja Records. Waldron's 1971 album The Call was the first release on the ECM sublabel JAPO; it featured Waldron playing an electric piano. He performed with the German krautrock band Embryo on the albums Steig Aus! And Rocksession. Waldron also wrote the score for George Who's a 1972 French film George Who?

Waldron first appeared in Japan in 1970 after being invited by Swing Journal to perform one of his earlier recordings. From 1975 to early 1980s, he made visits to the United States, mainly playing solo piano from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Other formats included a quartet with Joe Henderson, Herbie Lewis, and Freddie Waits; another quartet with Charlie Rouse, Calvin Hill and Horacee Arnold; and a duo with Cameron Brown; and a trio with Hill and Arnold. Waldron has appeared and recorded extensively throughout Europe and Japan. He reported that he allotted agents in France, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia a month per year, but that two months were set aside for Japan in the early 1980s.

Waldron collaborated with Steve Lacy in the 1990s and 1990s, notably in piano-soprano duets performing their own compositions as well as Thelonious Monk's. Duet albums, as well as others, were also popular in Waldron's recordings from the 1980s. Waldron said that this setting was partly chosen for economic reasons, but mostly for artistic ones: "jazz is like a dialogue." [...] So, it's more direct, faster, and more accurate to do this face to face." In 1986, Haruki Kadokawa's Tokyo Blues received a new film score.

Waldron went from Munich to Brussels in the 1990s, claiming that "nobody stands on the corner waiting for the lights to change in Belgium." In Germany, people watch the lights rather than the vehicles. "No one killed anyone." Waldron moved to the United States less often in the 1990s, because of the fact that smoking in several of the jazz clubs was no longer allowed. Waldron released several albums with vocalist Jeanne Lee around the same time. Two of his last recordings were duets with saxophonists who preferred to perform in melodic and free forms: David Murray and Archie Shepp. Waldron, a heavy smoker, was diagnosed with cancer in 2002 after years of indifferent health. He continued to perform in a Brussels hospital until his death on December 2nd of this year due to the cancer's complications. He was 77 and had appeared in Lille for the final time just weeks before.

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